The provocative classic work newly updated An intimate personal odyssey across America's changing sexual landscape When first published, Gay Talese's 1981 groundbreaking work, Thy Neighbor's Wife, shocked a nation with its powerful, eye-opening revelations about the sexual activities and proclivities of the American public in the era before AIDS. A marvel of journalistic courage and craft, the book opened a window into a new world built on a new moral foundation, carrying the reader on a remarkable journey from the Playboy Mansion to the Supreme Court, to the backyards and bedrooms of suburbia—through the development of the porn industry, the rise of the "swinger" culture, the legal fight to define obscenity, and the daily sex lives of "ordinary" people. It is the book that forever changed the way Americans look at themselves and one another.
Category: Health & Fitness

The provocative report on American sexuality that shocked the world when it was first published in 1981, Gay Talese's chronicle of American permissiveness, before the age of AIDS, is also a uniquely personal odyssey into the author's private self. Includes a new foreword by the author. Previous publisher: Dell.
Category: Sex (Psychology)

Love stories. Lesbian Fiction. Alex Foster's life is exactly as she wants it. She's quit her job as an English teacher and has decided to hole up in her newly acquired lake house for the summer to try her hand at writing a novel. She has close friends; she has her dog;she plays volleyball. She is content. Jennifer Wainwright is a young, wealthy suburbanite who's life is exactly as she expected it would be. She's married to her high school sweetheart who is about to inherit his father's law firm. She has friends. And she has the whole summer to work on decorating the new house on the lake she and her husband have just purchased as their summer home. She is content. A chance meeting over a runaway pooch is the start of a journey for each woman. Over the course of one unbelievable summer set on the beautiful shores of Canandaigua Lake in upstate New York, these two women will teach one another, learn from one another, question their own beliefs and expectations, and unwittingly fall in love.
Category: Fiction

From the New York Times bestselling author, a first novel as spellbinding as her acclaimed nonfiction At thirty-four, Nick Walsh is a broken, deeply cynical man. Since the violent deaths of his parents thirteen years earlier, he has been living alone in his childhood home in the suburban Midwest, drinking, drugging, and debauching himself into oblivion. A measure of solace is provided by his newly found relationship with Monica, a mysterious woman who seems to harbor as many secrets as he does. Obsessed with understanding the circumstances surrounding his parents’ deaths and deranged by his relentless sorrow, Nick begins a campaign of spying on his neighbors via hidden cameras and microphones he has covertly installed in their houses. As he observes with amusement and disbelief all the strange, sad, and terrifying things that his neighbors do to themselves and to one another, and as he, in turn, learns that he is being stalked, he begins to slowly unravel the shocking truth about how and why his parents died. At once unsettling and moving, humorous and horrifying, Thy Neighbor explores the nature of grief, the potential isolation of suburban life, and who we really are when we think no one is watching. What readers and critics have admired in Norah Vincent’s nonfiction is completely unleashed in this vivid and provocative novel.
Category: Fiction

On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. “Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America,” the letter began, “I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.” The man went on to tell Talese an astonishing secret, that he had bought a motel to satisfy his voyeuristic desires. He had built an attic “observation platform,” fitted with vents, through which he could peer down on his unwitting guests. Unsure what to make of this confession, Talese traveled to Colorado where he met the man—Gerald Foos—verified his story in person, and read some of his extensive journals, a secret record of America’s changing social and sexual mores. But because Foos insisted on remaining anonymous, Talese filed his reporting away, assuming the story would remain untold. Now, after thirty-five years, he’s ready to go public and Talese can finally tell his story. The Voyeur’s Motel is an extraordinary work of narrative journalism, at once a portrait of one complicated man, and an examination of secret lives and shifting mores in a culturally-evolving country.
Category: Social Science

A classic masterwork newly updated The electrifying true story of the rise and fall of New York's notorious Bonanno crime family On New York's Park Avenue on a rainy Tuesday night in October 1964, the famous Mafia chieftain Joseph Bonanno was kidnapped by two mobsters and reported by the police as dead on the following morning. More than a year later, Bonanno mysteriously reappeared, setting off a bloody mob feud that came to be known as the “Banana War.” In this monumental work—packed with intimate details and brilliant reporting—bestselling author Gay Talese first brought to the American consciousness a world and a life previously known to only a few. No other book has done more to acquaint readers with the secrets, structure, wars, power plays, family lives, and fascinating, frightening personalities of the Mafia.
Category: History

In Greenmarsh, Massachusetts, in 1774, thirteen-year-old Prudence Emerson keeps a diary of the troubles she and her family face as Tories surrounded by American patriots at the start of the American Revolution.
Category: Juvenile Fiction

A superb new collection from the illustrious career of Gay Talese, "the most important nonfiction writer of his generation" (David Halberstam). Admired by generations of reporters, Gay Talese has for more than six decades enriched American journalism with an unmatched ability to inhabit the worlds of his subjects. From the long-form Esquire articles that germinated into his masterful books--including Honor Thy Father and Thy Neighbor's Wife--to indelible portraits like the canonical "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and the recent, revealing account of avant-pop star Lady Gaga's studio session with the old-school crooner Tony Bennett, the pieces collected in High Notes are classics of the journalistic style Talese pioneered--"the art of hanging out," as he called it--and a bold testament to his enduring talent for unparalleled cultural observation and impeccable literary craftsmanship.
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Calvin Stonebridge was a brilliant financial adviser and surprisingly, a loner. Rumors had it that he didn't like women, but in real life it was the contrary. He never considered marrying, especially to an American woman until he met Sonia. There was only one problem; Calvin met Sonia at her engagement party to his colleague and friend, Steven. The idea to make Sonia his wife becomes his calm but firm obsession, as since they first met, she had become of the center of Calvin's universe, the center of his ignited desire to have her and her only. One thing unknown to anyone who knew him, what Calvin wanted, Calvin got, as long as it did not get in the way of playing with his "toys". Calvin Stonebridge's secret life was bound to come to light and justice was lurking around the corner, but only if he couldnt avoid. Many tried and many failed in their attempt to find out about Calvin Stonebridges secret world, if indeed it existed. His remarkable talent to camouflage his actions made everyone involved question; is there anyone capable to bring the Delta Force's fearless former soldier to his knees? Maybe one person could and that person makes Calvin wonder about his future, if there is any.
Category: Fiction